MAC McCORKLE: Democrats need 'Progressive Joe' and 'Scranton Joe'

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mac McCorkle is a professor of the practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He is a former Democratic consultant.

Democrats are understandably feeling better about President Biden’s 2024 presidential re-election chances after his State of the Union address.

The president’s forceful delivery about his record and plans seemed to dispel the notion that he was too old for the job. He even provided a “progressive” answer to the age issue, declaring:

“My fellow Americans the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are. Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas. But you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back. To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be.”

This framing of a battle between fresh progressive ideas for the future versus stale reactionary Trumpism could prove effective in solidifying base Democratic voters for Biden. But polling still shows Biden in a historically precarious position for an incumbent. Centrist critics argue that Democrats must make a “major course correction” away from the progressive left and tack back fast to the middle.

Those critics are correct that President Biden needs to go beyond the progressive Democratic base and pick up a healthy share of up-for-grabs voters to repeat his 2020 victory. But the prospects are dim for an incumbent president pulling off a major course correction with less than eight months before election day.

The larger problem is the unstated assumption centrist critics share with progressive advocates: the singular key to a Biden victory is nailing down a series of policy positions in an ideological sweet spot on the political spectrum. According to this view, a candidate’s underlying biography of values does not really matter.

Both sides are denying the hybrid reality and strength of Biden’s 2020 candidacy. His appeal was that he wanted to continue the progressive policy path he helped to chart during the Obama presidency with his rooted identity as an average “Scranton Joe.” Biden merged progressive policy stances with being an unapologetic capitalist, churchgoer, and patriot.

The State of the Union address distilled Biden’s main progressive policy side for the 2024 campaign. Now his campaign needs to weave in more of the capitalist, religious, and patriotic values of “Scranton Joe.”

In the State of the Union, President Biden actually repeated his often-made statement that “I am a capitalist.” But he still needs more of those positive “Scranton Joe” values on the dignity of hard work and how it should push people up the competitive economic ladder.

In the 2020 campaign, Biden targeted the way that employers’ abusive “non-compete” agreements block many lower and middle-income workers from moving to higher-pay jobs or starting their own businesses. In 2024, he should add a page from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s elimination of arbitrary 4-year college requirements for middle-level state government jobs and extend it to the federal level as well as the private sector.

“Scranton Joe’s” schooled instinct in the social welfare traditions of his Catholic faith also prevent his seeing capitalism as a libertarian casino game. With his respect for personal freedoms, the president’s independent-minded “lay” Catholicism mirrors views held by majorities of fellow Catholics. And Catholics broadly, not just Hispanic Catholics, constitute a key contested segment of the electorate.

Moreover, Biden as an observant religious person who understands the need for abortion and IVF options seems to be a comfortable combination for a wide swath of the whole electorate. The framings of religious rhetoric in his remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast last year are attractively ecumenical enough to be incorporated into his stump speeches.

Biden already attacks Trump on the patriotism front when pointing out the former president’s comments about dead soldiers being suckers. But this is a historical moment for a full-blown constitutional patriotism transcending partisanship in its appeal to true conservatives and liberals.

Trump’s insurrectionist January 6 actions and his calls for terminating the Constitution put America’s way of political life at stake. It is not a matter of the Constitution being some perfect document. But it represents the only endurable basis for the American experiment.

This reality drove the late Texas Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan fifty years ago during the Watergate hearings to declare: “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.”

Biden’s hybrid political character cannot match the intensity of Trump’s appeal to his MAGA base. Still it can spread further across the electorate than Trump’s MAGA-ism or the one-dimensional targeting of the political center or the Democratic base.

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